Project Threepio (Star Wars OOT subtitles) — Page 57

Dat_SW_Guy said:

I have just restarted the Tagalog subs for A New Hope, currently translating the first half right now.

Thank you so much – and keep an eye out for that dub!

On the subtitle positioning front, I’m trying out a “don’t shift any adjacent subs” demo on Jedi, and it mostly works, but there are two subtitles that I don’t really like being at the bottom (the rapid up/down/up effect Rondan mentioned, I don’t like it either). So I’m thinking it’s likely I’ll end up shifting fewer adjacent subs in Jedi, but not none, and I may very well keep them all as-is in Star Wars.

On subtitle positioning, I just ran a ROTJ demo I was really satisfied with. The only shifted adjacent subs were C-3PO’s “We’re doomed” and Luke’s “I must be allowed to speak.” Everything else is back in its normal position. I’ll do a similar test for Star Wars, but I’m thinking I may not make any changes there.

Next up: italics. Most subs use italics to specify an offscreen speaker. I’ve been using italics to indicate dialog coming from radios, loudspeakers, recordings, and ghosts. Any preference on this? I’m still inclined to the latter (there’s a lot of overlap, but not 100%)

Finally: SDH cues. Our SDH subtitles are pretty bare, but don’t need to be, since we also have plain English subtitles. We could add more cues for music, etc.

I should add that all the changes I’m talking about making are negotiable right until the very end, I’m just approaching an opinion of my own, which I’ll go with unless convinced otherwise.

Also, on the pre-crawl titles – the “A long time ago…” subtitle works fine at the bottom, so I plan to do that. The “STAR WARS” subtitle doesn’t really work anywhere initially, but works at the top or bottom equally well as that title recedes and doesn’t take up the full screen. Right now I’m in favor of moving that one to the bottom too, because my new rule is to only move to the top when it’s better than the bottom, and that subtitle is really equally bad anywhere in the screen.

Rondan said:

I agree with you about getting the subs out of the way so that you do not miss important details. But keep it consistent. If you put the subs up keep it up during the dialog. It is very annoying to go up down up down down up down up during a dialog. That is just my five cents.😄

Since you actually expressed exactly the thing I’m trying to avoid, what’s your opinion on my current plan? Basically, no changes to dialogue in Star Wars, but moving some subtitles back down in Jedi.

“Jabba, I’ll pay you triple. You’re throwing away a fortune, here!/Don’t be a fool!” – moved down because although it’s close to a Jabba line at the beginning, there’s a 2.5 second gap before Jabba’s next line. Also, the subtitles are over another shot which allows some mental separation from the surrounding ones.

“You will bring Captain Solo and the Wookiee to me.” – similarly, it’s kind of close-ish on the leading side, there’s a 6 second gap before Jabba’s next line, and it’s another shot.

I can provide demo files in the language of your choice, if it’d help.

Well, the SRT files don’t shift positions, and the English subtitles don’t shift positions either, so Im not sure that would help. I do my testing with German SUP files.

If you’re running an architecture that supports Wine, I believe you can run TSMuxerGUI in Wine to create an M2TS file that can then be played by VLC. I think there might even be a Linux native version of tsmuxer, but I’m not sure if there’s a GUI.

I am watching for just “flow” issues overall (just watch the movie and see how it feels), and both of the cases where I’m considering reverting back down are very borderline – I could see a reasonable argument either way. It probably wouldn’t take much to convince me to leave them at the top. The difference is that all of the others are clearly better on top, so no argument needs to be made.

Actually it’s usually an easier call than that. Most images of people are framed with more dead-space on the bottom than on the top. If it’s a full-body shot, you can cover the legs or the face (legs). If it’s a torso shot, you cover the chest or the forehead (chest). From a general scene composition point-of-view, I understand why the bottom is almost always the preferred location.

This discussion is really just a matter of how to make reading text as easy as possible. If you read text at a single location that disappears and reappears, that’s one thing. But if the text shifts to another location from time to time, not only is it a little jarring, but you also lose some reading time while your brain and eyes make the shift to reading at the new location.

This is made even worse with the burnt-in subs, because your brain sees the burnt-in subtitles at more-or-less the same location as your regular subtitles, and starts to process them BEFORE saying “wait a sec, these aren’t in the right language” and THEN you shift to reading the subs at the new location. Lots of jarring/loss of reading time in that process. Which is also why I think it’s worse with subtitles using the Latin alphabet–you actually have to start reading the text to see that the language has changed! Again, in an ideal world we’d have multi-angle scenes with localized burnt-in subs and so on, but as long as we’re working around them, I want to work around them in a way that’s easiest on the reader. So that sometimes involves shifting the subtitles to a new location and leaving them there until you don’t need subtitles at that alternate location for a long time.

EDIT: And dangit, I just talked myself out of any changes to the adjacent alien subtitles at all. The reason is kids. Subtitles for Project Threepio tend to show onscreen a little longer than your average subtitle, and that’s intentional. It’s because I want kids to be able to follow along, and they read slower. Which also means all those cases that were borderline for an adult aren’t borderline anymore. So thanks for the fire drill everyone! 😕 But I will still be changing the “A long time ago…” and “STAR WARS” subtitles back to the bottom.

Question, CatBus: Where can I find a text version of the original Chinese language subtitles from the Backstroke of the West DVD? It’s for a project I’m doing right now.

I know this isn’t OOT but I figured I’d ask since you’re the language master.

I’m afraid I have nothing on that at all. It’s funny, when I tell people about Project Threepio, the very first thing they usually ask is about Backstroke…

Yeah, the Nordic languages in general are pretty much your subtitle timing torture test. That’s why “summarized” subtitles are so popular there, you condense and drop sentences wherever you can. On the other end of the spectrum, I think Project Threepio’s slower subtitles probably cause some head scratching with Chinese subtitles, which I believe can be read much more quickly. One size, or speed, doesn’t really ever fit all – but boy does it reduce overhead.

EDIT: I should also add that while the other Nordic language subtitles in Project Threepio are in the condensed form (straight from the GOUT), the Finnish ones have been redone in a longer, more accurate form, so it was probably the worst possible language to try to match to Revisited’s English subtitle timing.

Oh, I usually just time everything to match my English subtitles, which are pre-lengthened from your typical English subtitle. In fact, it’s kinda hard to manage multiple timings in the project, so I’d recommend it.

Next up on the list of subjects to ponder: SDH subtitles.

I’m pretty certain I want to expand these considerably, but there are lots of questions about exactly how I should do it. Initially – like in the 1.0 days – the only English subtitles were SDH subtitles, and I forked them a few revisions later. But the SDH subtitles are still pretty minimal – subtitling only the things that help the movie make sense, not necessarily adding much in the way of atmosphere. Remember how lame the medal ceremony would seem without the iconic musical score? Yeah, I don’t want that to be how the whole movie goes.

So we need to subtitle music. At the very least, we do an adjective, like “tense music”, “triumphant music”, “militaristic music”, etc. Maybe modifiers for loud, quiet, brass, vocals. The cantina music could definitely be called swing music since it’s basically Space Benny Goodman. Any other ideas? Putting music into text is hard. Should we do little music note symbols?

Should I stick with all caps? I like to differentiate non-verbal subtitles as much as possible, but maybe brackets are enough. Should I put spaces between the brackets and the text?

For other things, I guess it’s a matter of finding the best words to describe various Star Wars sounds. I’m still inclined to not subtitle things that are obvious. Such as when an explosion happens onscreen, I don’t really think we need to see [EXPLOSION]. But when Darth Vader breathes, I think it’s worth subtitling that because you really may not know it otherwise. For that I was thinking [MECHANICAL BREATHING] on his first appearance, and then [VADER BREATHES] for subsequent subtitles. And then [VADER WHEEZES] and so on for variations.

I’ve done an initial run of cleaning up and filling out the SDH subtitles for Star Wars. I was surprised to find that I added or changed about 100 subtitles. I’m honestly still not sure how well subtitling music works in general, but it at least solves the problem of “there are so many scenes where nobody says anything and they’re not even doing anything, just looking at the sunset or getting medals put on their necks”. At least with these revised subtitles, you’ll be aware that music is a major component of the film, which is something. And in just as many cases, I can’t subtitle the music due to subtitles for dialogue/other audio taking priority, so it’s not omnipresent – mostly for music-only scenes.

I think song names – at least in these films – require the sort of deep background knowledge I’m trying not to require. i.e. I’m trying to avoid even using uncommon character names in the SDH cues. i.e. instead of “Jerjerrod” I’d say “Commander”.

Certainly whether it’s live music vs tracked music is relevant, and things like loud, soft, and some sort of adjective. I guess the test is – if you don’t know anything at all about Star Wars, how would you describe the music in a way that helps add to the film what the music adds, but without actually being able to hear the music.

It turns out it’s a less critical problem than I thought, since so much of the music is talked over and therefore loses any opportunity to subtitle without getting really crowded.